busy, busy, busy

A lot has happened since our last post. Here are a couple of pics to update you:

We spent a weekend in St. George where Emma rediscovered her love for rocks. She always seems to have a rock in her hand for some unknown reason - strange child. The reason for our visit was to cheer on our friend Lauren who ran the St. George marathon. It was fun to watch her come in and spend the rest of the day swimming and hiking - thanks for the great weekend Lauren!

We also made it to the Cornbelly's fall fair which featured the world's largest corn maize (above pic). Emma had a blast leading us around the maize, eating a foot-long corn dog, and playing inside princess castles (below).

They also had this really cool "jumping pillow" which was pretty much a massive trampoline. I think we enjoyed it more than the kids.

We were also lucky enough to find a babysitter and get a couple of tickets to the BYU homecoming football game - too bad we got our butts kicked. It was still fun to get out to the game instead of watching it on TV.

And, of course we spent Halloween night trick or treating to Emma's heart's content! Emma couldn't decide between dressing up as a "scary witch", a princess, or Tinkerbell - she finally settled for Tinkerbell. Jack made a great lion. The guy in the Michael Jackson costume in the last pic is Traci's uncle. We went walking around the mall with him and didn't get very far because everyone wanted to stop him to take a picture.

Finally, I just got back from Philadelphia were I attended a conference for school. Here are some pics from the trip including the Liberty Bell with Independence Hall in the background, and a good little restaurant where a couple of us had some amazing pizza.

We LOVE Fall!

Fall in Utah is beautiful - especially on a sunny, clear day like today. The trees are fully turned now and are an amazing sight to see. Because of the good weather, we decided to spend the afternoon playing up in the canyon which Emma was more than happy to do. Jack's been a little sick lately, so we've kept him indoors which means, unfortunately that Emma has had to be inside too - but not today. First stop was Vivian park which is right on a railway line that apparently runs through most of the canyon. There were a couple of older trains just parked off to the side, so Emma and I went over to check them out.

One of the trains had this massive snow plow attached to its front which Emma couldn't get enough of.

After the park, we went over to Bridal Veil falls where we took these shots of the kids messing around.

Man, I'm going to miss the sun!

more pic collages...

... are these getting old yet? I was trying to decide what pics to post from our last two weekends, and I just couldn't pick - so I went ahead and posted pretty much all of them. The first collage is from my weekend at Lake Powell with my MPH class - loads of fun! One of my classmates' family owns a houseboat down there, so we spent the weekend wake boarding, skiing, surfing, eating and jumping of stuff.


This next group is from this past weekend. Wymount Terrace (BYU on-campus housing - where we live) held a opening social with loads of fun games, a jumping castle, face painting (hence Emma's "Cougar Paw" cheek), hot dogs, and even a little train ride for the kids. Needless to say, we all had a ball.

Also included somewhere in there are pics from Jack's first try at solids - it didn't go so well (bottom of collage, third pic from the right).